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Crack and copy

26 June 1999

A landmark ruling in the British High Court could make it difficult for
software companies to prevent their rivals copying the tricks that make their
programs work.

Copying the code of a program breaches copyright, but many software companies
also encrypt their code so that rival programmers can’t easily discover how it
works and then write a subtly different program that does much the same job.
However, in a dispute over software used in vending machines, the judge ruled
that encrypted code is not confidential. So anyone decrypting it would legally
be able to write a program that works in a similar way.